Recently, robotic surgery systems using passive flexible catheters have been developed for minimally invasive surgical applications. The soft, atraumatic construction of these devices help reduce injury to delicate anatomical structures while providing a means of tool placement and control. To provide kinematic and control relationships, various models of continuous catheters have been develope...

We study the bending of a book-like system, comprising stack elastic plates coupled through friction. The behavior this layered system is rich and nontrivial, with non-additive enhancement apparent stiffness significant hysteretic response. A dimension reduction procedure employed to develop centerline-based theory describing as non-linear planar rod internal shear. consider coupling between no...